Anti-bias workshop with Suzanne Wertheim
We are committed to working towards an anti-racist and inclusive language science community at UMD. This is the first in a series of workshops aimed at helping us develop skills we need to build supportive professional relationships and a community environment that engages and encourages everyone.
Please register here so we can arrange breakout rooms for discussion ahead of time.
Leveraging linguistic anthropology to analyze everyday bias
How can we address bias in the workplace? One of the best remedies is to understand, in a foundational way, how bias is expressed in interpersonal interactions.
This training uses linguistic anthropology to lay out a clear framework of everyday bias. We will focus on three important components of speech-event analysis in order to unpack how bias is encoded. We will then examine the non-neutrality of language, and how it relates to the frequent gap between intent (good) and impact (not so good). And we will close with analysis and discussion of real-world examples of problematic interactions in academic workplaces.
About the speaker
Dr. Suzanne Wertheim is Founder and CEO of Worthwhile Research & Consulting. After getting her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Berkeley, she held faculty positions at Northwestern, University of Maryland, and UCLA. In 2011, she left the university system in order to apply her expertise to real-world problems. She now specializes in analyzing and fixing workplace culture, especially around issues of bias and communication.
This workshop is co-sponsored by the Language Science Center, the NRT grant, and the Departments of Linguistics and Hearing & Speech Sciences.
